Communications over a WAN are becoming increasingly critical for corporations and other entities, particularly for real-time communications over a WAN such as voice over IP (VoIP), video over IP, and session establishment via SIP. Applications such as these and other WAN applications pose new challenges for WAN performance monitoring systems.
In conventional corporate WAN architectures, such as hub-and-spoke, the number of paths to measure increases linearly as new sites are added. In addition to these traditional architectures, where remote and branch sites mostly communicate with regional and headquarter sites, traffic from direct VoIP communications between remote sites is becoming an increasingly important component of the overall traffic. In this case, the number of paths to measure increases geometrically with the addition of new sites.
Additionally, VoIP users are not willing to tolerate performance degradation in the bearer traffic such as a few seconds of “dead air” in a live conversation.